Nuclear Protest

December 23, 1985

PEKING — The students marching around Tiananmen Square on Sunday were an unusual sight. They were protesting nuclear testing in Xinjiang. There is no record of other nuclear protests in China. The students, about 200 to 300 of them, carried signs from the square to the entrance of government headquarters. The Xinjiang autonomous region is a desertlike area in Central Asia populated largely by ethnic minorities. It is where China exploded its first atomic bomb in 1964.